Thomas Page McBee - Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man

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Also by Thomas Page McBee

Man Alive: A True Story of Violence,

Forgiveness and Becoming a Man

Scribner

An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2018 by Thomas Page McBee

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Scribner hardcover edition August 2018

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Interior design by Erich Hobbing

Jacket Illustration by Xavier Schipani

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McBee, Thomas Page, author.

Title: Amateur : a true story about what makes a man / Thomas Page McBee.

Description: New York : Scribner, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017061731 | ISBN 9781501168741 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501168758 (tp) | ISBN 9781501168765 (eISBN)

Subjects: LCSH: MenIdentity. | MasculinitySocial aspects. | MenPsychology. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Mens Studies. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General.

Classification: LCC HQ1090 .M394 2018 | DDC 155.3/32dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061731

ISBN 978-1-5011-6874-1

ISBN 978-1-5011-6876-5 (ebook)

For my mom, Carol Lee McBee, who taught me how to fight

In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, but in the experts there are few.

Shunryu Suzuki,

Zen Mind, Beginners Mind

Me: I wish you could experience how differently people react to me now that Im a man.

My brother: I cant imagine, but I can imagine.

According to the laws of physics and USA Boxing, this wasnt a fair fight. But there we were, two guys past our primes, circling each other in front of seventeen hundred drunk onlookers in Madison Square Garden, that hallowed hall of American boxing.

Since July, Id bled at the gums and screamed into pillows and almost quit. Id failed. Id temporarily, and to varying degrees, lost my mind, my hearing, and my friends. All so that a guy with seventeen pounds on me could beat bruises across my face, both of us a messy mosaic of blurred senses, damp armpits, hot lights, tangy throat, rubber-mouthguard bite marks, squeaky pivots, spangles of stars.

All so that my fists could connect with his stomach, and his mine. It would hurt, the stinging price of knowing my bodys upper limits, but for now my muscles harmonized out their combinations as a meditative quiet sucked the cheers out of the stadium. I understood that we were both just sinew, and blood, and bone, and follicles, and decay.

The truth was, I loved him even as I danced around him with my hands in the air. I was a new man, the first transgender man to fight in the most storied boxing venue on earth, there to close the gap between us like the fiction that it is.

W hy do men fight? What makes some of us want to get hit in the face? What makes others show up to watch?

What makes a man?

When I first began injecting testosterone, I was thirty years old and needed to become beautiful to myself. I clocked my becoming primarily in aesthetic terms: the T-shirt that now fit me, the graceful curl of a biceps, the glorious sprinkle of a beard. I loved the way men looked, and smelled, and held themselves. I loved their lank and bulk and ease, their straight-razor barbershop shaves, their chest-first centers of balance. I loved the quiet efficiency of the mens restroom, the ineffable physical joy of running alongside my brother, the shadows we cut against the buildings we passed.

I loved being a man in that I loved having a body. I had surgery to reconstruct my chest; I stuck a long needle into the meat of my thigh each week; I changed my name and my place in the worldall so I could quit hiding behind pulled-low baseball hats and rash guards, free to pull off my shirt and jump right into the waves.

The joys I found at first were daily, simple, and rooted in the warm physicality of a new freedomtoweling off after a shower and catching a glimpse of my flat chest in a foggy mirror; the way clothes suddenly fit my squarer shoulders and slimmer hips. The extra muscle mass that squared my walk, broadened my hands, my calves, my throat. I touched the dip of my abs, half-naked in the bathroom, and the muscle and skin synced in the mirror. I turned, and he turned. I smiled, and he smiled. I expanded, and so did he.

Stories about trans people, when we hear them at all, often end with such shining symbolism, meant to indicate that the man or woman in question has succeeded, in the transition, in the grand task of finally being themselves . Though thats lovely, and even a little true, in the same way a pregnancy or a near-death experience can act on the body like gravity, reshaping our days and memories and even time around its impactit isnt where my story ends. Not even close.

I am a beginner, a man born at thirty, with a body that reveals a reality about being human that is rarely examined. Most of us experience gender conditioning so youngresearch shows it begins in infancythat we misunderstand the relationship between nature and nurture, culture and biology, fitting in and being oneself.

This book is an attempt to pull apart those strands. It also became, as I wrote it, a kind of personal insurance, a way to track and shape my own becoming in a culture where so many men are poisonous.

I too come from a long line of poisonous men.

As the testosterone took hold and reshaped my body, its impact as an object in space grew increasingly bewildering: the expectation that I not be afraid juxtaposed against the fear I inspired in a woman, alone on a dark street; the silencing effect of my voice in a meeting; the unearned presumption of my competence; my power; my potential.

I could feel myself forming in response to conference calls and tollbooth workers and first dates. I was like a plant in the sun, moving toward whatever was rewarded in me: aggression, ambition, fearlessness.